Sunday November 25th

Digging into Continuation Monad

Wut

Today, I spent the day trying to get a sense of a couple things.

Continuation Monad

CPS (Continuation passing style)

SECD

I spent the day doing a fair amount of reading, and plodding along in Sandy’s Types book.
It was a long and tough struggle, because a lot of it was dealing with the constant reminder that I’m not anywhere
where I’d like to be yet. I am learning a lot and it’s definitely stretching me, and I spend a lot of time just trying
to get things to work. However, it is a book that I plan to spend time on re-reading when I get better at Haskell.
For example, I definitely am not able to complete all of the exercises in the book right now. I do the best I can
at the moment.

Bear in mind that I had no idea what any of these things were (listed above) before today.
I have a better understanding, and find some (eg SECD and Krivine) to be fascinating.
I will list a list of resources I read up on today (or at least looked at) below. I pretty much went through
and took a pass from beginning to end of these resourced listed (below) today.

Feelings of Not being good enough

I constantly feel this. I’ve run into some situations where I’ve felt like people were competing with me,
(in one particular incident, I realized only afterwards that the person in particular was doing anything they
could to prevent me from gaining more experience, even though such person had a CS degree, a great GPA and
great job prospects) and I am perpetually perplexed by this because in my mind,
I am the quintessential underdog. I’ve gotten this far solely by trying to outwork the person next to me.
But maybe one day, it won’t be enough.
I don’t have a CS degree, and I’m out of my mind for applying to grad school,
but I want to be there. I just need to convince someone that I will be worth a spot there. I’m competing
constantly with people who are in a better position, so I usually expect disappointment. But I keep going because
I don’t see myself doing any other thing. And what is a life if you don’t try, right?

Recources

I perused these today. I loved the BRICS one, and the Stack Overflow answer, as well as Landin’s paper.
What I especially liked is that these particular papers are about ideas and are not swimming in PL notation,
so they were a lot easier for me to follow. I’m not a Scheme expert, so some of the code took a bit of time to
follow (eg in the SECD paper that showed its evaluation-dump process), but it was still reasonable if I spoke
it out loud.